The Boy Responds

So, my beta test confirmed what the home pregnancy test told us, of which I had no doubts.  Now I am just hanging out, getting ready to go on a lovely vacation, and waiting for my back/butt to finally feel a bit better.  Oh yeah, and I'm also busy turning 37 today!

In the meantime, here are the answers to your "Dear Boy" questions.  If anyone feels like they missed out and wants to ask him more questions or follow-up questions, I'm sure he'd be happy to answer them.

 Dear Boy:  I have heard from the super awesome alterna-famousish girl you're with that you are in many ways the solid positive anchor in the process.  Can you explain how you do it?  What's your theory (or perhaps secret)?  

I kind of do it out of necessity. There's a few layers of it. First of all the traditional patriarchal "I am the man so I am the strong one" expectation that in spite of all our radical politics I think continues to exist in some form. But mostly somebody's got to do it and Sharon's the one being filled with hormones and poked and prodded, so really it's up to me.

Sometimes I fail to be the "positive anchor" because I'm in a bad mood or feeling selfish but I hope I've kept that to a minimum. It can be hard when I am upset about how it's all going because I sometimes feel that I can't go to Sharon with it. Any of my complaints pale in comparison to her physical or emotional experience. 

The worst of it is probably that I end up turning down my emotions about the whole situation so that I can more effectively support Sharon through it. Sometimes she gets a bit of a numb bum and sometimes I get a bit of a numb heart.

I know it's totally open-ended, but I'm curious as to what his role is in all of your health stuff.  So he has to inject you in the bum, right?  But do you do the belly stuff?  and aside from that, does he come to every single appointment. or does he decide which to attend?

Until the progesterone shots Sharon was unwilling to let me anywhere near her with a needle. Until this cycle I've had an entirely non-medical role. Part of my role has been to "worry about the money stuff" which means shutting up about my frustrations with American's inefficient healthcare system and taking a new job that has some fertility coverage.

As far as appointments I come to all of the "important" ones - where we're talking with a doctor, or there's something more surgical going on (egg retrieval, embryo transfer). I think I've made it to basically all of our appointments this cycle and most of our appointments last cycle. Now that my work is an hour's drive the other direction it's fairly inconvenient to go to UCSF but I've managed to. When we were in the IUI study there were a lot of appointments that were merely a blood draw - I missed a lot of those because there wasn't a whole lot for me to provide.

For decision making so far we've been lucky enough to agree on basically everything. For things that affect Sharon's body (basically everything medical in this process) I feel like she has a veto, but for everything else I feel that we need to come to compromise or consensus.

How do you stay connected to/engaged in the process?  

As I said in an earlier answer, I end up disengaging to some extent to be able to provide support.  I'm not a writer and less into sharing my personal feelings on the Internet.

I have found that having a job this cycle (injection PIO) has made me a lot more aware of the rest of the stuff that Sharon is doing (synthroid, patches, etc.)